Thirty-Nine

It’s my birthday today, and I’m thirty-nine. I have no fear of forty. I expect that every year from here on out will get a little bit easier: we’re still in the trenches with three young boys, but not quite as swamped and stressed and sleep-deprived as we were when Sol was a little baby. I think “it’s downhill from here” in the best of ways—every step a little bit easier, the terrain a bit gentler. Next year Sol starts preschool. It’s only two mornings a week, and since it’s a co-op one of those will be the day I work at the school, but still…I’ll have three hours, once a week, entirely to myself. I haven’t had that for eight years.

And a year after it’ll be two mornings, and then three, and then Sol will start kindergarten, and eventually we’ll get to the point where Sam and I have nothing to do but sit out on the front porch in our rocking chairs, smoking corncob pipes. Every step of that path looks attractive from here.

So that is why I am not afraid of forty. But today I am thirty-nine, and I’m grateful to be celebrating it in a quiet way with my family, the greatest of life’s gifts.

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